A Place to Find Shelter: Donald Quist’s ‘Harbors’

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The first thing you’ll notice upon opening Harbors by Donald Quist are the two epigraphs introducing the collection of essays, the first by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the second by Lucille Clifton. Clifton is a contemporary black American poet, and the former Poet Laureate of Maryland, where Quist spent most of his early childhood years. Clifton is steeped in feminist politics and pushes poetic boundaries, a contrast to the British Victorian embodied by Tennyson. This white European bard held the Poet Laureateship for both Great Britain and Ireland and is lauded for his attention to craft and melodious lines. Beginning with these two poets makes sense. It highlights Quist’s respect for both classic literature, as well as its projected future — we must know our history in order to understand the future. Like the diverse geographical regions from which his introductory poets hail, Quist always has his feet firmly planted in multiple homelands: Maryland and South Carolina, U.S. and Thailand, the double consciousness of being both black and American. His duality starts at conception, since his mother is black American and his father Ghanaian.

This doubleness affects even the identification of the book’s genre. This collection seems more like creative non-fiction because of its use of the author’s name in many of the pieces, but the publisher has labeled the group essays. But these days it is increasingly common to blend/blur/bend genres, so wrestling with how to label this collection is essentially futile. Sadly, many readers may have missed Donald Quist’s first debut short story collection, Let Me Make You a Sandwich, because it was a self-published collection funded mostly by Kickstarter fan pledges. However, readers should investigate Let Me because it also serves as a primer of sorts for Harbors.

Where Quist truly excels in Harbors is when he utilizes and creates new forms. “Tanglewood” is written entirely in the risky second person point-of-view. Of course, writers such as Junot Díaz, Claudia Rankine, Pam Houston and others have popularized second-person narration. But despite its quasi-popularity, it’s a gamble, because the narration is difficult to sustain for extended amounts of time. A different kind of POV experimentation occurs in “In Other Words,” where Quist the narrator speaks from both the “I” of Donald as well as the “I” of his wife, “P.” This crafty trick allows the narrator to critique himself with a fine-toothed comb: “He says, ‘Why do I live in this country?’ I ask him what he means, assuming he’s just being dramatic — Donald is very dramatic.” Occasionally this shifting point of view can be confusing, but whatever messiness it creates, the dazzling results are worth it. The essay “Lesson Plan” begins as a written academic lesson plan similar to what Quist’s narrator, and Quist himself, would use in his own classroom that he heads in Thailand. It ends in “Notes for Citation,” but twice erupts into a Q&A from the narrator’s students. This Q&A may seem rudimentary, but the issues discussed bring racial stereotypes back into focus without settling for easy answers.

“Have you sold drugs?
–Yes, but that wasn’t why I was arrested.
Why were you arrested?
–I did something I shouldn’t have done and it’s a lot easier to get arrested in America when you look like me.
Why is it easier to get arrested?
–Because of racial bias, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. Or maybe it isn’t.”

Two of the most touching stories (and more traditional in format) are “Junk” and “Till Next Time, Take Care Of Yourselves, And Each Other.” The first is a moving account of the narrator’s (and his wife’s) decision to clean up his mother’s house before he goes overseas, a task complicated by the fact that the mother is a hoarder. She is also simultaneously dealing with the slow deterioration of her eyesight due to a medical condition. The story tugged at my emotions. I know the mother’s tendency to hold on too long to household items won’t help her hold on to her son. “I might not be able to correct my mother’s junk eyes or clear the mess from her home, but I can pack up my own life in a way that gives my existence order.” I sense (and I suspect readers will as well) that Quist is leaving as a way to control what is essentially uncontrollable — his mother’s hoarding and slow descent into blindness.

“Till Next Time” describes the narrator’s relationship with another important woman in his life, his grandmother Thelma. While she was a woman who smoke, drank and didn’t attend church, she practiced her faith and generosity by advising and assisting random neighbors. After mock-therapy sessions with neighbors Thelma would, “posit a final thought for them to consider as they went on their way, and sometimes I’d notice her visitors appeared a little less sad or angry or scared than they had looked before.” Quist balances Thelma’s (also known as The Old Lady) pseudo-saintly spirit with her penchant for Jerry Springer episodes, illustrating that people are much more complex than we give them credit for. And sometimes, like the Springer Show, the very thing that people denigrate can be extremely therapeutic and necessary to economically disadvantaged people.

This review would not be complete without mentioning the stellar “I’ll Fly Away: Notes on Economy Class Citizenship”. First published at The Rumpus, it is required reading for those contemplating the racial and class complexities of contemporary America. This puts Quist in company with other writers meditating on race and citizenship: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rankine, and James Baldwin. But don’t overlook the tender moments of interpersonal connection in this book. Mastering narrative like other transnational writers such as Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri, Quist captures coming-of-age dilemmas and family dramas with finesse. Yes, there are countless other essays, short stories, and poems out there currently examining the borderlands of human existence and racial identity. But readers should flock to Quist because he illustrates that being a decent human being isn’t simple or easy. Quist articulates not only his geographical, ethnic, and class complexities well, but explores the grey spaces in between with delicacy and verve.

In the end, I continue to return to “The Animals We Invent.” As a black American female struggling everyday with growing racial tensions, I find comfort when Quist’s narrator says, “I want to share what I’m learning about the capacity of grace, the difficult but empowering work of allowing myself to forgive without forgetting.” What a beautiful sentiment; what a wonderful place to find shelter.

Celeste Doaks
is a poet and journalist and the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, Wrecking Ball Press, UK. Cornrows was listed as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2015” by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. doaks is a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee; her most recent poetry project is as editor of Not Without Us, forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in February 2017. doaks received her MFA from North Carolina State University and teaches creative writing at Morgan State University. You can find her on Twitter @thedoaksgirl.

“I’m not sure that I have a social conscience,” Joan Didion once said in an interview about her 1983 book, Salvador, about the El Salvadorian civil war. “It’s more an insistence that people tell the truth. The decision to go to El Salvador came one morning at the breakfast table. I was reading the newspaper and it just didn’t make sense.”
This is what separates Joan Didion from the rest of the world. We all wake up to news that makes no sense every day. What, we wonder, is going on with all these white cops shooting black men on our streets? How can it be that we still haven’t closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay? On what planet is Donald Trump a viable candidate for president? We register the answers we receive to these questions as nonsensical, but then we click the next link and go on with our day. Didion, facing her era’s knottiest public puzzle, hopped the next flight to El Salvador.
Salvador, as it happens, was not Didion’s finest hour as a reporter. She spent just 12 days in-country, had little Spanish and less knowledge of the country’s culture and history, and the book she wrote had, by her own admission, “no impact. None. Zero.” But her reasons for writing it offer a revealing window onto her working method and provide her biographer, Tracy Daugherty, with a crucial plot point in the thematic arc for his sprawling biography, The Last Love Song, which comes out this week.
In the 1960s, as Americans battled in the streets over civil rights and the war in Vietnam, Daugherty reminds us, Didion lost faith in the defining narratives of American life. A fifth-generation Californian whose ancestors had crossed the plains in covered wagons, only narrowing missing disaster at Donner Pass, Didion found that the country she lived in had ceased to make sense to her. A popular presidential candidate was shot in a hotel kitchen just miles from where she lived. A newspaper heiress was abducted from her Berkeley apartment and weeks later strapped on an M1 carbine to help her abductors rob banks. A scrawny self-styled guru set up camps in the desert where he persuaded a loosely organized family of runaways to kill a pregnant woman and three friends with steak knives. “I was supposed to have a script and I had mislaid it,” wrote Didion in the title essay of her collection The White Album.
I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequences, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie, but a cutting room experience.
Putting her finger on the sense of dislocation felt by Americans of her generation, raised on John Wayne movies and rousing tales of America’s triumph in the Second World War, made Didion famous, but it also left her at an intellectual and emotional dead-end. This, after all, was the woman who opened The White Album with the words, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” If the stories we tell ourselves no longer make sense, if even the briefest glance at the underlying facts exposes our national and personal narratives to be transparently hollow, how are we to live with ourselves?
In the 1980s, in a series of books that began with Salvador, Daugherty argues, Didion learned to look past the official narrative and focus on the story behind the story, the one found in a close reading of trial transcripts, declassified cables, and the back pages of underground newspapers. “Increasingly, in the 1980s,” Daugherty writes, “Didion’s writing discovered the real American stories not in the scenes, but behind them, in obscure rooms in queer places with unpronounceable names, where our government’s military and economic interests coiled in dark corners.” There, “in the outposts and archives, in the safe houses and bunkers, a logical, continuous, and traceable -- if findable -- narrative was unfolding all along.”
Didion’s pursuit of the story behind the story lifted her out of her post-1960s malaise and set the stage for a stream of brilliant late-career reportage, much of it written for The New York Review of Books, that peeled away the façade of American political and cultural life, laying out in Didion’s distinctive flat, declarative sentences how things really work. This late run culminated in Didion’s best-selling book, The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 memoir of her husband’s death in which she turned her formidable powers of analysis back on her herself, exploring how the lies we tell ourselves can also save us.
The Last Love Song is far too long, devoting hundreds of pages to decades-old Hollywood gossip and exhumations of skeletons in the closets of Didion’s extended family members, but at its core it provides an indispensable guide to understanding not just the value of Didion’s contribution to American literature, but how she pulled it off. Among the pleasures of Daugherty’s portrait is the light he sheds on Didion’s literary education, first at U.C. Berkeley, where she learned the close reading skills that came in so handy later in her career, and then at Vogue in New York, where a first job writing captions for photo spreads taught her how to get the most meaning from the least number of words.
In this age of blogs and YouTube rants, when the length of a piece of prose is determined largely by the amount of time its author can afford to spend writing it for free, we forget how formative the demands of writing for a physical page were for writers of the print era. At Vogue, Didion’s photo captions were a kind of fashion-plate haiku, “blocks of text, thirty lines long, each featuring sixty-four characters.” Didion’s editor would have her write 300 to 400 words, and then, attacking the page with a blunt pencil, whittle it down to the most evocative 50. “It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’” Didion later said. “I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words...a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy, but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.”
From caption writer, Didion climbed the masthead at Vogue while taking assignments from publications as varied as Mademoiselle and The National Review and writing her first novel, Run, River, at night and on weekends. These were the fat years of the Age of Print, when television was still in its infancy and the G.I. Bill had just put a generation through college. At Time, where her husband John Gregory Dunne worked when Didion was at Vogue, “waiters from the Tower Suite on top of the Time-Life Building rolled in buffet carts with beef Wellington and chicken divan and sole and assorted appetizers and vegetables and desserts.” Liquor was served in “prodigious quantities” and hotel rooms “were available for those suburbanites who had missed their last train, or would so claim to their wives when in fact all they wished was an adulterous snuggle with a back-of-the-book researcher.”
The largesse of the print-era gravy train meant that when Didion and Dunne moved to California, they not only could count on a national audience for the columns they wrote for Life and The Saturday Evening Post, but that they could afford to do so while living at the edge of an estate overlooking the sea a few miles south of Los Angeles. In fact, in the 50 years since Didion left her editor’s desk at Vogue in 1964, decades in which she and Dunne lived in some of the toniest neighborhoods in New York and L.A., neither of them ever held a job other than writer.
Of course, the economic bounty provided by glossy magazines and Hollywood script deals would have meant nothing if Didion had nothing to say, as is demonstrated, perhaps unintentionally, by Daugherty’s exhaustive chronicling of the checkered careers of John Gregory Dunne and his brother Dominick. Daugherty’s tales of the Brothers Dunne, along with that of Didion’s sad, alcoholic adopted daughter Quintana, who died of acute pancreatitis in 2005, comprise a sort of shadow narrative in The Last Love Song, one that bloats the book to more than 700 pages and occasionally threatens to overwhelm the central story.
But if Daugherty makes too much of John Gregory Dunne’s angst over his mediocrity and Dominick Dunne’s long road from cokehead movie producer to closeted bisexual celebrity crime journalist, one comes away from The Last Love Song with a renewed sense of how rare true talent is, what a gift it is -- for the bearer, and for her audience. John Gregory Dunne was every bit as committed to his craft as his his wife, and Dominick Dunne far eclipsed her gift for self-reinvention, but only Didion possessed the luck of serving as a human tuning fork for the anxieties of her age and the dogged curiosity to pursue those anxieties wherever they led.

When Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman translated the text commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, he began by changing its title. The Tibetan appellation -- bardo thos grol -- lost its meaning in Americanization, he claimed. A direct translation would yield no references to a “book” or indeed even “the dead.” The bardo is something other than death; it is an intermediate state. In Buddhist cosmology, it is most commonly understood as the period of transmigration, between death and new life, when the consciousness is waiting on the platform for the proverbial next train. To reject the common misnomer and restore the sense of the bardo that his forebears had misconstrued, Thurman was descriptive in naming his new translation. The full title of his 1994 publication: The Tibetan Book of the Dead as Popularly Known in the West, Known in Tibet as The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between. The keywords, in case you missed them: in the between.
The bardo is a karmic gauntlet. The deceased, untethered, experiences a succession of phenomena both terrific and terrible, proceeding eventually to the next life-form. The passenger is besieged by an overwhelming weakness like melting. Her vision becomes “a mirage of water down a highway.” She feels a thickening of the tongue. The sky is “full of orange sunlight,” and then, suddenly, “full of bright dark-light, or pure darkness.” The bardo is experienced differently by each individual in a manner determined by her actions over the course of a lifetime, or several. Was the passenger ruled by hate, frustration, and ignorance? Or, on the other hand, did she practice generosity, sensitivity, and tolerance? To spend one’s life preparing for this time -- by reading bardo thos grol, for starters -- can mean the difference between passage to a higher life-form or a sojourn in one of several hells, each unique in its particular hellishness. The passenger who understands the between is the one who might have influence over its machinations and the verdict delivered at its outcome. Her liberation is for the taking.
With Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders -- like Thurman -- elevates the in-between to titular status and therein joins a tradition of American poets and prose stylists whose work signals tutelage in Tibetan Buddhism. He’s in good company; such heavy-hitters as the Transcendentalists and the Beats also availed themselves of the Buddhist texts available to them in their respective epochs. The title also announces his induction to a second healthy club; the life and times of Honest Abe are a Pierian spring.
The bardo -- though named nowhere in the text other than in the title itself -- is the stuff of both setting and plot. The narrative takes place within a graveyard, a cage where ghosts endure the shape-shifting, sense-confounding phenomena described in bardo thos grol. The residents of this graveyard are subject to physical transformations that reflect, in thrilling Saundersian dream-logic, their particular karmic burden. The novel features three primary narrators: Reverend Everly Thomas is frozen in likeness to The Scream; Hans Vollmann is impaired by an unwieldy erection; Roger Bevins III can’t finish a story without spiraling out on Whitmanesque rants -- unbidden catalogues of the senses -- while his features multiply until he is a kaleidoscopic vision of too many mouths, eyes, and hands.
The narrative concerns the struggle of those who, in Thurman’s words, have not developed “the ability to die lucidly, to remain self-aware…during these transitional experiences.” Saunders dramatizes their ineptitude by casting a familiar funerary world in the vocabulary of those who would deny the reality of their death during its progress. As the ghosts would tell it, they are not dead; they are just ill. Coffins are “sick-boxes” in which to wait out an interminable recovery period. Ghosts look upon their decaying bodies with passing curiosity. The mechanics of their phantom world -- the ability to glide across surfaces without the customary steps, to slip through walls, to occupy someone else’s body and assume their thoughts -- amount to the symptoms of an as-yet undiscovered illness.
The story begins when the president’s young son, Willie Lincoln, joins this cast of revisionist ghosts. Willie died of fever toward the beginning of the Civil War. A long procession saw him to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. In Saunders’s telling, Willie is not ready to be cut loose. He waits in the bardo for his mother and father to collect him. Against the advice of other ghosts, who warn Willie of the particular grievances that befall children in the bardo, he sticks around because he is so in love with the world he knows that he is not ready to leave it. Be warned, reader -- when young Willie narrates, Saunders most often foregoes the period:
It is soon to be spring The Christmas toys barely played with I have a glass soldier whose head can turn The epaulettes interchangeable Soon flowers will bloom Lawrence from the garden shed will give us each a cup of seeds I am to wait I said
In this nostalgic stance Willie is no different from the others in the bardo. All of them are besotted with longing for their own equivalent Christmas toys and cup of seeds. They wait for relatives, they wait for vengeance, they wait to amend their regrets. They wait -- for weeks, or decades -- for return. They are ruled by their own stories, thrust by disorientation toward self-absorption and magical thinking. These are stubborn ghosts, holdouts; they have rejected multiple opportunities to move on. All of them, Willie included, are trapped by their tireless belief in an eventual homecoming. Willie becomes exceptional, however, when the object of his longing actually shows up. Into the crypt walks a tall, unkempt man of flesh and blood, quietly sobbing: enter Lincoln, in the bardo.
When asked what inspired him to write a novel, Saunders cited the generative power of this image. Lincoln’s storied nighttime visits to the graveyard called for a longer form -- a “mansion,” as Saunders himself has put it, instead of the “tiny custom yurts” that he is wont to build. His objective wasn’t to write his first novel. It was to “discharge the idea” of Lincoln, commander-in-chief, taking leave from his post at the helm of the most deadly crisis in American history to pay clandestine visit to the corpse of his eleven-year-old. “At some point,” said Saunders, “just from the accretion of pages, it was clear that the arc of the story was going to be… longer.”
Saunders is as qualified to build mansions as he is to build yurts. His virtuosic range of narrative voice -- previously on display in his several short story collections -- finds expression in this novel thanks to an inventive formal arrangement that allows for literally dozens of narrators. Though the first two pages are formatted as one might expect a novel to be, the narrative is soon interrupted by a curiously-formatted name, and then another. These names are attributions that follow each utterance; in some senses, this novel reads more like a play. Though initially the cast is composed solely of ghosts, Lincoln’s entry into the bardo (and thus into the narrative) multiplies the number of voices that Saunders must call on to tell this story. The author includes entire chapters of primary- and secondary-source material “curated,” in his terminology, to give his readers necessary historical context. The number of voices proliferates further because, in the fictional world of the bardo, the event of Lincoln’s visit brings forth ghosts that had hitherto been silent or silenced. Each “line” is attributed to one member in a vast symphony of narrators counting among its members historians both real and fabricated, a motley crew of phantoms, and the living graveyard watchman. The bardo is no place for omniscient narration.
Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is thus, itself, its own kind of bardo. If anything, its formal qualities condition its readers to develop a palate for the bardo’s active ingredients: dynamism, plurality, impermanence. Consider, for example, this account of the sky on a night shortly preceding Willie’s death. This comes from a chapter that, at first glance, weighs heavily historical on the historical-fiction axis, in which Saunders cites witnesses and scholars qualified to weigh in on a party that the Lincolns threw while their son was gravely ill. Whether the source material is real or not is irrelevant -- what matters is that the reader can ground this fantastic plot in a context with which she is familiar. As the accounts accrue, however, the bedrock of historical fact begins to shake loose and sensation takes over. Reading it, I am reminded of the changing sky so vividly described in bardo thos grol:
There was no moon that night and the sky was heavy with clouds.
Wickett, op. cit.A fat green crescent hung above the mad scene like a stolid judge, inured to all human folly.
In “My Life,” by Dolores P. Leventrop.The full moon that night was yellow-red, as if reflecting the light of some earthly fire.
Sloane, ibid.As I moved about the room I would encounter that silver wedge of a moon in this window or that, like some old beggar who wished to be invited in.
Carter, op. cit.By the time dinner was served, the moon shone high and small and blue above, still bright, albeit somewhat diminished.
In “A Time Departed” (unpublished memoir), by I.B. Brigg III.The night continued dark and moonless; a storm was moving in.
In “Those Most Joyful Years,” by Albert Trundle.
Keep reading and realize that Saunders’ bardo signifies more than that one transitional state when the tongue grows huge and the world begins to look like a hot desert highway. Saunders elevates the status of the in-between; the in-between is everything.
In the process of grieving his dead son, Lincoln is made to acknowledge that impermanence is the only constant. Reflecting on Willie’s life, he remembers a baby, a toddler, a boy. Lincoln realizes “he was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst…he had never stayed the same, even instant to instant.” Lincoln thus describes the bond between him and his son as such: “Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another.” This moment could be read as Sauders’s contribution to a growing corpus of American translations of bardo thos grol. In Thurman’s rendition: “All moments of existence are ‘between’ moments, unstable, fluid, and transformable into liberated enlightenment experience.” Where the bardo begins and ends, no one can know.
While Lincoln was inside the crypt ostensibly having this realization, the country beyond the graveyard was in the grip of a fearsome between of his own command. The outcome of the war was uncertain, and it was only just beginning to dawn on many what kind of mess the country had gotten itself into. In 1863, Lincoln would deliver the Gettysburg Address and the tides would turn against the Confederacy. In ‘62, however, the president’s legacy was far from assured.
This reality bears heavily on fictional-Lincoln’s realizations in the bardo. One might think that a dawning sense of total temporariness could threaten the president’s resolve. Why fight for for capital-D Democracy, for the capital-U Union, if any potential outcome (and every step along the way) is just a transition to a next transitional state in an infinite sequence of assured, unpredictable transitions?
I don’t want to give away the ending by telling you whether Abe escaped nihilism, but we all know how the Civil War resolved. According to Saunders, the president’s time in the bardo conditioned in him a reverence for fluidity and the resolve to act rightly because (not in spite) of it. The bardo -- for its ghostly inhabitants, for the reader, for Abe and Willie Lincoln -- is a training in the hard work of choosing generosity, sensitivity, and tolerance over hate, frustration, and ignorance; needless to say, this makes Lincoln in the Bardo a timely read. Saunders suggests that Lincoln’s time in the bardo gave him the perspective he needed to lead the country through its own transition as the bardo thos grol would have it: lucidly.

1.I have rarely trusted an author as implicitly as I trusted Edmund de Waal, after reading the preface to his book, The Hare With the Amber Eyes. The eponymous hare is carved out of ivory, and fits in the palm of your hand. It is one of a collection of 264 such figures, called netsuke in Japan, where they were carved, now owned by de Waal.
The netsuke collection was passed to de Waal from his great-uncle Iggy, who inherited it from his parents, who received it as a wedding gift from their cousin Charles Ephrussi, who collected them in Paris in the late 19th century, when japonisme was all the rage. The Hare With the Amber Eyes is therefore the story of the Ephrussi family, filthy rich bankers from Odessa who sent their sons and grandsons to Paris, Vienna, and London to establish a financial empire.
As de Waal says in the preface, “It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin.”
De Waal is a professional potter, and his impression of any environment - even a remembered or imagined one - is very tactile. When he enters a room, he notices its objects, their textures, who must have made them, and when. When he thinks of the netsuke’s previous owners, he wants to know where they kept the collection, how often they picked up the carvings and rolled them around in their fingers. He will have no nostalgic, sepia-toned portraits of Charles Ephrussi dandying around Paris. He looks into the past, at his great-grandfather’s cousin, and wonders: if this man bought these carvings a century ago, and I’m holding them in my hands, how are we connected?
2.
Charles is a fine man to be connected to. Even as a Parisian transplant, living on Rue “New Money” Monceau, he worked his way to the center of fashionable society. He loved art. He collected it - Manet, Renoir, Degas - and wrote about it, as the editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. His rooms in the Ephrussi household were carefully curated, ever in flux and a la mode.
Charles was known to be one of two models for Proust’s Swann - “the lesser it was said, of the two” - and intimately connected to Proust himself. I have a soft spot for Proust - I think anyone who has read his novel feels proprietary towards the world of it. Finding him and a version of Charles Swann walking around in de Waal’s family history was like bumping into an old friend. Ephrussi and Proust were friends. Charles advised him on his translation of Ruskin, let him use the library at the Gazette, and invited him to the Rue Monceau to see his collection.
Descriptions of Charles’ paintings, and of his cameo in Renoir’s Boating Party (he’s the one in back in the top hat) make it into Proust’s work, but there’s no evidence in his writing or letters that he saw the netsuke, although a simple timeline would suggest he did. Among Charles’s impressive collection, the netsuke were an anomaly. Japonisme had been fashionable for a few seasons, but Charles seemed to retain a fondness for them. When his younger cousin Viktor Ephrussi was married in Vienna, he sent the entire collection, in its vitrine, as a gift.
Charles and Viktor were each the youngest boy in their family - the boys that weren’t groomed for finance. From among Charles’s noteworthy collection, sending Viktor a case of odd, whimsical figures - the ivory hare, the persimmons, the turtles, the peasant woman, a coiled rope - seems like a wink. “You might find these interesting,” I can hear him say. And indeed, as the mighty Ephrussi dynasty was scattered and depleted throughout the 20th century, the netsuke were kept close to the chest - hidden by a family servant while Nazis plundered the rest of the collection, given to Iggie, Viktor’s shy, sensitive son, and finally to de Waal.
We can never know the people who came before us, but we can own their dining tables, walk the streets they walked, put the Japanese knick-knacks they bought in our pockets, and infuse them with meaning. De Waal frequently carried the hare with him while he traveled to Paris, Vienna, London, and Tokyo researching the book. While hunting down the details of their lives, he had a constant reminder that it was a story leading to his own.
3.
After having fallen in love with Charles Ephrussi while reading The Hare With the Amber Eyes, I learned that a painting he owned, Renoir’s Two Sisters, now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, across the street from my office. I stopped by after work one night to look at what Charles looked at. I got up close, examining the brush strokes, imagining him standing in his rooms in Paris showing it to Proust. Or perhaps the two of them in a different corner, discussing translation, while the two sisters watched silently. What does this mean, my brain struggled to conclude, what am I feeling? It was free night at the museum, which shares an ambiance with a mall food court, so the mystical me-Charles-Proust connection eluded me. But I was satisfied to know that the life of Renoir’s painting now included both Proust and myself. This may be why we love to keep things, and pass them on. As the netsuke do for the Ephrussi family, the objects that survive are what prove that we’re part of each other’s stories.

Erpenbeck's mastery of language and image ripples through her pages. Her prose is so controlled and flowing. Her chapters are compact lessons in form and function, some long, most short, all well-contained.

Pamela Erens’s new novel, Eleven Hours, opens with the push and tug between laboring patient and nurse. Lore, the expectant mother, rigid and stubborn -- “No, the girl says, she will not wear the fetal monitoring belt” -- and Franckline, her nurse: “These girls with their birth plans…as if much of anything about a birth can be planned.” Orphaned, friendless, and estranged from her baby’s father, Lore is poised to deliver alone. Franckline, by contrast, is more sociable, a seemingly happily married woman from Haiti. Through Franckline and Lore, Erens continues interrogating the core contradiction that threads through two earlier novels: The simultaneity of twinness and aloneness.
In light of this core contradiction, Eleven Hours’s outwardly different protagonists - Lore is white; Franckline is black -- share important characteristics. Franckline is herself pregnant. Out of superstition of miscarrying, she has not informed her husband. Just as Lore’s isolation derives from loss and betrayal, it also transpires that Franckline’s past is one of suffering and disruption. Thus Lore and Franckline form a pair, each with private misgivings about her pregnancy and impending birth, each entangled in the other’s present.
Layers of finely wrought details frame these women as matched puzzle pieces. Moving seamlessly between them, Erens renders them singular and affecting, deftly weaving in their backstories while remaining rooted in the novel’s central drama: Lore’s labor. With indulgent pragmatism, Franckline watches her patient fight to control the uncontrollable process of birth. Lore is inflexible; Franckline knows better:
Anything can happen, and often does...Babies twisted up on the umbilical cord, starved for oxygen for a little too long. Birthmarks obliterating a child’s face, absent fingers or toes. Fifty-hour labors, a mother suffering a heart attack while pushing (that one was only thirty-two years old, grossly overweight, yes, but seemingly hale, with an energetic, generous laugh; they saved her, but it was touch and go).
Lore is less than self-aware; Franckline is generous, attuned, and self-aware, to the point of underestimating her own kindness: "The pregnancy has made her mean, made her small, Franckline thinks. On the subway and in the street, she looks away from pregnant women -- seven, eight, nine months along -- so as not to poison them with her envy." Lore is a speech teacher at P.S. 30, while Franckline considers her own, hard-earned English: "How supple her speech is now! How she surprised herself at times! She is proud of her English; after eleven years it is almost flawless."
Eleven years, eleven hours. Duality is literature’s lifeblood; writers frequently quarry opposites. William Shakespeare loves his twins; Mark Twain, his Prince and the Pauper. Contemporary novels embed alternate endings within the same book. Jenny Erpenbeck’s recently translated The End of Days offers two interpretations of the same facts in each of its five segments. Lionel Shriver’sThe Post-Birthday World splits into divergent paths -- the road taken and the other road taken.
Erens makes a fresh contribution. Along with creating original and nuanced characters, she pits duality against intense isolation. Her astonishing debut, The Understory, tells the wrenching story of John Frederick Ronan, who squats in his deceased uncle’s New York apartment, living in his head. He is obsessed with twins, hunting for them around the city, using two personal aliases. Readers wend through his warped reasoning -- twisted from either his inability, or his lack of desire, to engage with others. He arrives at a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York seeking shelter, having been evicted into homelessness. In the silence of the monastery’s enforced, pre-dawn meditation, Ronan reflects: "I have no family, no home, no friend, no books. Surely they can leave me my thoughts."
Reading The Understory is itself a meditation. Sublimely paced and rigorously crafted, The Understory investigates not only Ronan’s raw isolation, but also his drift toward coupling; a love that unfolds with disastrous consequences.
Erens’s second novel, The Virgins, centers around two teenage lovers at a tony boarding school. While their classmates imagine steamy sex, Aviva and Seung’s relationship is rife with the unsaid -- misunderstandings and misconceptions that ultimately coalesce in tragedy. Aviva and Seung come from different cultural backgrounds, but their disconnection is rooted in something more fundamental; a set of experiences that impedes their ability to trust the people with whom they should be closest.
In Eleven Hours, the characters are similarly disconnected. Franckline has had to break with her family of origin, imbuing her with a powerful streak of self-reliance. Lore was orphaned young, but it is the ugly betrayals of those around her, including the father of her child, that have convinced her to go it alone. Erens deploys a character named Julia -- who introduces Lore to the man who will father her baby -- to address the subject of rape and its aftermath. With this subplot, Erens signals what is finally being publicly acknowledged: Rape is endemic to the female experience, far more common that we choose to admit.
Perhaps Lore’s child will splice her loneliness, but during labor, her isolation is stark. Here is a contraction, exquisitely captured:
...the moan this time is not simply a moan of will and pain but a call into the emptiness: Is anyone there? There is a blackness spreading into her vision and she feels herself spinning in an unlit sky. Empty, empty, her moan cries.
And later, as Lore strengthens her resolve that the baby’s father will never be part of her baby’s life: "Now she would be her own fiancé; she would marry herself. She would be both father and mother to this child. It was, really, one of the most ordinary stories in the universe."
Eleven Hours is, at its most basic, the story of a woman about to mother a daughter (Lore has found out she is carrying a girl). Erens writes thoughtfully on pregnancy and mothering, mining her own challenges with breastfeeding. Mother-daughter pairings appear throughout the book. At Lore’s mother’s funeral:
...she looked down at her mother’s face, relaxed of some of its characteristic lines, and thought that here lay the only person who would every truly understand her, the only person she would ever care to be close to.
Franckline, whose mother’s “soft murmuring patter dried up near Franckline” after a teenage dalliance, is rescued by another mother, the one who would become her mother-in-law. Neither Lore nor Franckline share information about their mothers; instead they engage in a kind of emotional parallel play, in which they give free reign to their thoughts within the confines of a small hospital room, keeping everything to themselves. Between nurse and patient, there is a whiff of the mother-daughter, as if Lore were a cranky toddler continually saying "no" to Franckline’s experienced advice, and Franckline her long suffering parent.
Franckline reaches for Lore’s hand...There is flesh bunched below the wide silver band on the fourth finger, like a thick putty squeezing out...The finger above the ring is paler than the other fingers, with a bluish tinge. Franckline should tell Lore in no uncertain terms, in her practiced nurse’s voice, that the ring must be cut, that she could lose a finger. Franckline should use a word like necrotize, a word that makes young women pale and listen. But Lore would simply repeat 'no.'
Lore sneaks out of her room, wandering into another part of the hospital like a rebellious teenager escaping an overbearing mother, and realizes she has gone too far: "Come get me, Franckline, she thinks. Come find me. Come help me, come make it all easier." Contrite, Lore makes it back and shuts the door.
Franckline arrives at the room a couple of minutes later, out of breath, her eyes reproachful. 'I’m sorry,' blurts Lore. How she hates that phrase! It’s like trying to move sand around her mouth. But she cannot bear Franckline looking at her like that.
With passages like these, Erens skates perilously close to troubling, clichéd territory: Competent, wise black woman supports white woman in her struggle. Erens seems to recognize the dangers of descending into such a well-worn trope, skirting offense by giving Franckline a complex interior life, and by masterfully filling out each character.
Eleven Hours is crafted with the taut economy of The Understory, and with the same laser focus on human alienation. In fewer than 180 virtuoso pages, Erens knits together two women, two lives, two stories. Each woman has borne serious trials; each is detached from her family of origin, albeit for different reasons. Each has reason to worry about bringing new life into this world. They are together, but brutally alone. And yet for the duration of Lore’s hospital stay, their communion feels both necessary and illuminating. What passes between Franckline and Lore lifts them above despair, thrusting them toward life itself.

Wait a second. No, seriously hold on. Just a few more minutes.Oh. Sorry. It's you.I apologize for being late. Well, I only partially apologize. It is to be expected, really, with the Fourth of July striking and the World Cup ending.Yes. The World Cup. Sorry about my rudeness a little earlier - I've been busy for the past few weeks attempting to will my adopted club (England) to win (they didn't) and commit my arch-enemies (Brazil, Argentina) to lose (they did).With all of these distractions, both footy-wise and not, it was difficult to get any books read this past month. Yet (you'll be happy to know) I did complete a few. And while the most noteworthy book might have been Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn, I found that my favorite - my book of the month - was Sean Wilsey and Matt Weiland's The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup. By far.Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some crazed soccer fan. Once every four years, I rediscover international soccer - primarily, the World Cup. And every four years, once the tournament is over, I promptly lose the love I had displayed just months before. I always mean to stay in touch once the World Cup is over, but I never do. I don't know enough about European clubs and can't find coverage of United States soccer, so I just lose it all together. But for a month and a half, I'm an expert.That's what led me to buying The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.Wait. What exactly does this "guide" entail? That's easy. It's 32 essays by 32 different writers about the 32 countries that participated in the 2006 World Cup Finals. And of the heavyweights showed up: the essays range from David Eggers' gym teachers (who call soccer a communistic cesspool) to Aleksandar Hemon's unfortunate mix of sex and soccer. Nick Hornby struggles with the choice between club team (London's Arsenal, which employs a vast number of the French national team) and country (England, of course). Does he root for England? Or does he root for his Arsenal players? Sukhdev Sandhu thinks Saudi Arabia's too soft, while William Finnegan laments the loss of Portugal's best surfing spot - thanks to modern culture and, in part, soccer.But wait - there's more! On top of 32 great essays, Franklin Foer (Jonathan Safran's brother - any regular reader of this column knows of my fascination with the entire family) describes the government most likely to win a World Cup ala his book How Soccer Explains the World. And it's got all the numbers - useful demographic information on each country, past World Cup winners and the records of current World Cup participants, and the likelihood of each team to win. It's great for everyday soccer fans, and invaluable for the every-four-years fan, like myself.Amazingly, there's a common theme outside of the typical "Go Team Go!" narrative. At the World Cup, everyone, regardless of country, has a chance. Once the ball is kicked off, all teams are on equal footing. No monetary means will secure your team a victory. Rich soccer teams can buy all the talent they want - AC Milan, Barcelona, Manchester United, Chelsea - but only citizenship will get you a World Cup championship. Just the allegiance to your country. And every country can build a team. All you need is a soccer ball and a flat pitch.It's called the beautiful game because it's the joining of athletics and the pure will to win. Sure, there will be 0-0 ties. But the defensive stops, the fight to get to the goal, the sheer determination that leads to a cross pass that is beautifully set up by some guy that wasn't even there ten seconds before and then kicked into the back of the goal - that's sport.And that's why this book will continue to be a valuable addition to my library years after France (hopefully) beats Italy (boo!) tomorrow. It's not just a guide to this World Cup, but it's a guide to the desire of winning. The passion of being a fan. The ramifications of a single goal, of a clean sheet, or of a beautiful penalty kick. (Where are you now, David Beckham?) Most of all, it's a beautiful synopsis of the game itself, of its strange gravity and powerful importance.Because this is more than just a game."The joy of being one of the couple of billion people watching thirty-two nations abide by seventeen rules fills me with the conviction, perhaps ignorant, but like many ignorant convictions, fiercely held, that soccer can unite the world."Corey Vilhauer - Black Marks on Wood PulpCVBoMC Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June